Destiny Loot Will Be Individually Distributed, So Feel Free To Play Well With Others

Reports are coming in about Destiny loot distribution. It turns out that the time honored fight over who gets loot will never be a part of the upcoming game from Bungie. All Destiny loot will always be yours! That is to say that every player will have their own loot and won’t need to worry about negotiating with other players over who gets the most awesome weapon.

Destiny is being described as a shooter with some elements of an MMO. Gameplay footage has revealed that you will certainly be bumping into other players while in public areas, and you will work cooperatively during the dynamic events. You can have your own team, but you won’t necessarily have to group up with the other players for the public events. This play style leads to concerns about Destiny loot. If everyone can participate, who gets the phat lootz?

You Do!

In an interview with Polygon, Bungie COO Pete Parsons says that Destiny loot will be distributed individually. Everyone will have your own drops and you will get the correct loot for your particular character.

“We want everybody to be excited to come in and play, so we have private loot streams, which means everything in Destiny is meant for your character. You’re not fighting over weapons as they drop from enemies and it gives you a really good reason to go back to places you’ve already been before.”

What does he mean, “go back?” Well, imagine you are playing with a buddy and they need upgrades. They want to go though content that you have already done. As you kill the baddies, the Destiny loot that drops will show up differently to both of you. The loot that drops for your character will be relevant for you. Your friend’s loot will be relevant for them. You will always have a reason to go back and run through content.

The Destiny loot plan is a great way to keep players social. There will be no reason to head out by yourself unless you really want to play alone. The more people you play with, the more fun it is. It’s a good plan.

What do you think? Is this a good way to get rid of in-game fights?

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Game sharing on Steam might be in the works!

Last week at E3 there was a whole lot of talk about how gamers won’t be restricted on sharing games with friends when they buy the PS4, but Xbox will restrict people to only sharing with 10 people. It, along with the always online portion of Xbox, has been a point of major contention for gamers as they debate the merits of each system. Now it appears Steam may be preparing to get into the ring on game sharing.

NeoGAF found a some lines of code in the Steam Beta which seem to indicate they are at least thinking about allowing some game sharing. This line “Just so you know, your games are currently in use by %borrower%. Playing now will send %borrower% a notice that it’s time to quit” seems to indicate it will be a typical sharing set-up where only one person can play a shared game at a time. The upside as the sharer is even if someone else is playing a game you would still be able to play, the downside as the person being shared with is you would be kicked out of the game.

Another line is “SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicense_Title” “Shared game library” which seems to indicate to me there might be an option to share your entire game library with people instead of just individual games. If they do choose the full library method but also restrict the number of people you can share with, it could be a really raw deal in some cases. Say you have a friend who you want to share one game with, and he has all the other games you have except this one game. You’d mostly be wasting one of your shares just to get him that one game. Hopefully there would be an option to choose share game or library.

If you would like to take a look for yourself you would need to opt in for the Steam Beta and then download it. Then click on Public/steamui_english.txt in your Steam folder and read through the lines. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world but it can be nice to see everything for yourself. Also, I should mention this could just be a test Steam is trying and it might not ever make it live. So don’t get your hopes up too much, it is interesting to think about though.

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Last night, five Gamebreaker staff featured in a Jimmy Fallon World of Warcraft video!

Blizzard contacted Gamebreaker a couple of weeks back to ask for submissions for a Jimmy Fallon World of Warcraft video. Being people who are heavily into the whole World of Warcraft thing, as well as a hive of video content creators, we were happy to oblige, and we were thrilled to have so many of our people feature front and center in the resultant video, shown last night on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon! So, if you weren’t on the ball, who from Gamebreaker did you miss? 

Well first up we had our very own Magickmann, a.k.a. Mike Byrne, who runs our sister site freetoplay.tv. He got himself a featured spot! 

And shortly after Mike popped up, Legendary’s Olivia Grace made a short appearance in a featured spot, swaying gently with her plush Gryphon: 

And then, as they cut to the larger shot, including more people, we saw Legendary’s Pat Krane, as well as Conspiracy Craft host, social media guru and moderator extraordinaire Adriane Clark a.k.a. Missy, and our amazing moderator Adrienne Hall a.k.a. Lactarded! 

Gamebreaker was thrilled to be involved, and hopes that you enjoy the video. Yes, it was cheesy, yes it was a little silly, but yes, we had fun, and that’s what matters. It’s worth noting that, while we sent videos in to Blizzard, they had no control over the end product, that was all down to the Late Night team, so we were very lucky to be picked out.

Personally, I think the community surrounding the game is one of World of Warcraft’s greatest strengths, it is a social game after all, and while, inevitably among over 8 million players, there are bound to be people who are unkind, it’s a pretty great community. 

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Blizzard Senior Community Rep Jonathan “Zarhym” Brown has revealed details of Blizzard’s player monitoring system

He brought up Blizzard’s player monitoring system while responding to a thread about how Blizzard doesn’t care about griefers, where a player recounted a sorry tale of zoning in to Dark Animus, and getting tanks was taking a while, so one impatient DPS started the encounter and dropped group. The poster was, not unfairly, a bit miffed, as in this situation the player can’t be reported – they have dropped group – and indeed there is no specific course of action clear for affected players to proceed. 

So Zarhym wanted to be very clear on how exactly Blizzard was working to combat this behavior, and so told the forum about a system that’s been in place since Wrath of the Lich King first brought in the LFG tool: 

So what we’ve done is developed a hidden system that tracks player behavior in matchmade groups on a number of different levels. We don’t go into a lot of details about the system for a few reasons: A) we’ve been constantly evolving how intelligent the system is, B) the system is dynamic so that it can apply penalties based on varying factors — it’s analyzing trends as they change over time and accounting for them in some fashion — and C) we don’t want players to know exactly how the system starts penalizing people for less-than-average behavior and then try to game it.

Suffice it to say, the things you do in a matchmade group matter. If you’re above the average in kicking players out of groups, being kicked from groups, or ducking out early (as described in the OP), deserter debuffs, kicking thresholds, and the like become increasingly less forgiving.

Yep, you read that right, Blizzard is watching you! Of course they can’t reveal details of just exactly how, but it might provide some comfort to those players who are the subject of trolls and griefers. It seems like a good system, that penalizes people on the right basis, but firstly, is it really enough? Is there not more that Blizzard could be doing to combat the bad behavior that appears every now and then in WoW? 

And does this just feel a little bit like big brother to you? Personally I like it. I have nothing to hide. Nothing at all. Nope. 

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Microsoft wants to charge you $500 for their “next gen” – we say BUILD YOUR OWN!

E3 is sadly over for another year, but that doesn’t mean the console war is over, oh hell no. Nerds will be waging wars for years to come whilst PC gamers sit back and watch the ashes…and laugh….and laugh some more.

Here at GAMEBREAKER HQ, although we like to give consoles a little bit of love from time to time, we’re all kind of PC nerds, we don’t hide it. Myself? Well as well as being known as ‘Megatron’ amongst my peers (Go figure ) I’m also one of those computer build geeks, often found, during our daily meetings, throwing out random numbers and specs to deaf ears or disgruntled pleads for mercy. That’s not to say I don’t love my consoles, I really do! Heck for the majority of the past 10 years I’ve played my Xbox a lot more than my PC…I totally just admitted that. Uh oh.

Nerd Vs Microsoft…who comes out victorious?!

Not every member of the team is as forgiving of our console counter parts. With the dust still high in the sky from the PR disaster that was the Xbox One event, I was handed a challenge by some of the more cynical members of the GAMEBREAKER team, with the intention of throwing a whole bag of salt into the open wound; Once again to prove the superiority of our PC overlords over their little brother console counterparts, by designing a PC that not only triumphs over the XBone in pure performance, but also matches it in price.

Well, well, well! What a mighty challenge we have there! I mean,  consoles are supposed to be value for money right? You shouldn’t be able to pick up something…dare I say cheaper and BETTER?!? Blasphemy.

So, what are we competing with? The Xbox One has the following specs;

• 8 Core AMD Processor
• 8GB DDR3 RAM
• Blu Ray Player
• 500GB HDD

Not a lot in all honesty, as it all seems fairly standard PC specs…Surprise, surprise. Then again, they did prove that it can already run on a PC. The only thing outside of our reach is the 8 Core AMD Processor – why? Well that’s because that truly is the only claim to “next gen” any of the next gen consoles have, as it isn’t due out until late this year…and even then it’ll be pricey…so maybe that’s where your console value for money shines through?

Either way, with my $500 price range and the unholy powers of the world wide interwebs at my fingertips, I set to work on my Frankenstein. But just how hard is it to come up with something comparable to the Xbox One? Well actually not a great deal. All it takes is a quick jump onto Newegg and we’re in business.

Kick em whilst they’re down…

So, as we don’t know the full graphical capabilities of the XBone, we can put some of our industry knowledge to use and assume it’s a few years old at this point. Case? Cooling? doesn’t matter! The XBone is made of freaking plastic and only has the two fans so that wasn’t a crying point.

What did I come up with? Welll check it out!

• LG Black 12X BD-ROM – $49.99

• DIYPC MiniQ7-W USB 3.0 w/Dual White Fans White – $29.99

• Hitachi GST Deskstar E7K500 – $37.99

• Diablotek PDA Series PDA-550BW 550W – $53.99

• Silicon Power 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 - $53.99

• ASRock A55M-VS FM1 AMD A55 (Hudson D2) Micro ATX – $42.99

• AMD Athlon II X4 651K Llano 3.0GHz – $84.99

• ASUS HD7770-DC-1GD5-V2 Radeon HD 7770 GHz – $129.99
  

Total? A cool $483.92 

Oh wait, whats that? $15.08 less than the Xbox One?!?! BUT WAIT, there’s more! You can get a $20 mail-in rebate AND a free copy of Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. I think it’s safe to say “PC WINs”. In terms of capabilities, sure, it may not be THE best on the market, and it’s processor doesn’t match the one in the new consoles dollar for dollar, but it’s near as dammit close. Graphically I’ve got a feeling with the 7770 only being 2 years old, it would more than outperform the Xbox One – not to mention everything is UPGRADABLE. Another victory for PC! Sadly if you took the Intel route, things would get a little more pricey…but looking for a budget desktop to breathe down Microsoft’s neck? There you go, son!

Sorry, Microsoft…I love you dearly and all, but in the battle of Nerd Vs Corporation…Nerd comes out victorious!`

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Open world zombie survival horror game State of Decay coming to PC.

Undead Labs has confirmed the PC release of their fastest selling Xbox Live downloadable title State of Decay in an interview with Xbox Wire. Yes, they confirmed a PC version of their game with the official Xbox blog. I know it seems ironic, but hey at least it didn’t get cut from the interview. They also confirmed the release exclusively for Steam.

This is good news for me at least, I had been waiting on a potential PC release. I didn’t really want to buy it on Xbox Live. After all the news that came out during E3, I’m avoiding as much Xbox branded stuff as I possibly can. It also seems like a game that would play better with a mouse and keyboard than a controller. I think if Sony really wanted to crush Microsoft, they would announce official mouse and keyboard support for all PlayStation 4 games. But that’s neither here, nor there.

During the interview, Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain explained, “We’re currently working on a PC version for release on Steam. Fortunately it’s been in development alongside the Xbox 360 version since Day 1, so we just need to integrate with the Steam platform and add native support for keyboard and mouse control.”

Seems these ladies and gents know what’s up when it comes to porting a game from console to PC. In fact, it seems like most developers have finally gotten the memo about terrible ports. Hopefully, they don’t skimp on options and configuration scaling. With this coming generation of consoles, there will be fewer and fewer excuses developers can use for releasing incomplete or poorly performing ports. All thanks to the fact that both systems are running on x86 PC architecture.

GAMEBREAKER NATION, are you guys ready for some State of Decay?

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Like it or not, there will be a FFXIV subscription fee when A Realm Reborn launches, but why was this decision made?

A common occurrence in the comments for almost every Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (FFXIV) piece that I write is the response of “I’d check it out but not with a subscription.” I can see that point though. With the current free to play trend of most MMORPGs in the market that Square Enix will be re-launching into, it could be a bit of a sticking point for many gamers.

A few months ago I even dove into just the topic of a free to play Final Fantasy and why I didn’t think it would happen any time soon. While those were my own opinions at that time, today Yoshi-P, Producer and Directory of FFXIV‘s relaunch, took to the news waves in an interview with Venturebeat (Gamesbeat) to explain the rationale behind a FFXIV subscription fee.

While I won’t post the entire response here as it is quite lengthy but very interesting, I will tell you that Yoshi-P feels that MMORPG development today falls into two categories, those games that are investor tied and rely on fast income to pay all involved parties off but then may struggle with funding for future updates, and those companies like Blizzard and Square Enix that self fund their projects and can afford to wait for a more steady and reliable income off of a small fanbase.

Don’t misunderstand though, Yoshi-P was not advocating one model over the other, he explained that in his opinion the FFXIV subscription not only ensured a somewhat steady rate of income for the developer (which allows for better planning for future updates) but also provided a better game for FFXIV players because they could enjoy the benefits of a more steady rate of updates.

It’s an interesting debate and while Yoshi-P uses references to Star Wars: The Old Republic and RIFT as recent examples of games that were built to be subscription based but changed due to market conditions, he doesn’t feel that the FFXIV subscription fee  is an “outdated” payment model as it fits with the high budget proportions of the game’s development. Yes, he acknowledges that their player base may be smaller than some other games on the market because of the subscription fee, but he is banking on knowing what type of income will be coming in monthly rather than maybe having a customer shell out $100 today and then never pay for anything again.

Personally, I’ve already expressed my opinion of being fine with a FFXIV subscription. I am fine with any game that wants to charge a subscription as long as I feel my money is worth it while I play, but in this age of F2P I can also see why many want to at least play for free for a while before making the call to shell out hard earned cash.

Check out his full response in the link above and let me know how you feel on the topic below!

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What are you trying to tell us Carbine?!

About an hour ago Team WildStar made the following tweet:

Carbine Voices ! https://t.co/KaasFreXbY

— Team WildStar (@Team_WildStar) June 18, 2013

The gist of it is the Dev Team has money on their minds. While this could relate to almost anything, I’ll put my money on tomorrow’s WildStar Wednesday finally revealing what business model they are going to go with. Fans (and detractors) of WildStar have hotly debated the business model over the last few months, championing their favorite type. The debates only increased when Jeremy Gaffney, Executive Producer for Carbine, referred to the Payment model as being “hybrid” in a recent interview with Micheal Byrne. Many people took it to mean they’ll be doing F2P with a sub option, still others thought perhaps it meant WildStar would be B2P with a cash shop. I still personally am hoping for B2P with a cash shop.

Hopefully tomorrow we will know WildStar‘s business model for sure! Otherwise the WildStar Community Team are just a bunch of cruel people.

Update

So it looks like this was a case of me seeing what I wanted to see here. I was so excited at the possibility of finally knowing what the business model will be that I saw the first tweet and ran with it. However, the WildStar Community team just sent the following tweet to me stating their previous tweet has nothing to do with the business model announcement. So aside from the amusement of seeing my hopes get dashed, the vine tweet was just a bit of fun they are having.

.@gamebreakertv It’s just a coverage of our Carbine Voices. Nothing to do with any biz model announcement. Sorry!

— Team WildStar (@Team_WildStar) June 18, 2013

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This week on the Republic, SWTOR patch 2.2 is here, new items have hit the cartel market and Damion Schubert has things to say about next gen consoles.

There was a bit of a delay but it’s finally here! Everyone say hello to SWTOR patch 2.2. Luckily, the delay wasn’t nearly as long as people expected.  But.. what came with the patch?

Well.. For one.. the horrifyingly worded Nightmare mode of Terror from Beyond. Yeah.. I’m just gonna go over here now…

Okay.. So what else? Well.. For one: guilds are getting experience bonuses for every five players — not counting free players. That’s an interesting take for a F2P game, isn’t it? In addition, the CE vendor has been updated and the bindable dye situation seems to have been sorted.

Sadly.. Larry is still being denied chat bubbles in SWTOR patch 2.2.

New items in stock!

There a new cartel pack in the market as well as some other interesting items like a mint ice cream lightsaber? Are we eating them now? Is this how this works?

The more sports minded among you can look forward to some new huttball armor while the more goth Jedi and Sith can get some black-core sabers. Aaaaand. For those of you who’d like to get off your feet for fifteen seconds… There’s the all new “portable relaxation unit” optimized to make sure you don’t end up sitting around for too long.

Damion Schubert on consoles everyone!

Relax guys… Bioware has no plans for SWTOR on consoles… At least.. Not according to this:

Oh.. Wait.. Um… Well… I guess maybe we might eventually see it on consoles anyway? I guess it’s good to leave your options open.

All that and more!

If you’d like to submit a viewer question, you can send it to submit@gamebreaker.tv.  If you want to send a video question, make sure it’s about 30 seconds long and upload it to YouTube.  Then just email us the link! And,  if you missed last week’s episode, you can check it out here.

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CD Projekt might be between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the Witcher 3 PC version.

CD Projekt Red has been against the concept of DRM for, well, ever. They have even gone on the record as saying “We use no DRM and we never will.” But now Microsoft is making life a bit difficult for CDP. There was some expectation that CDP might pull Witcher 3 from Xbox to live up to their stance on DRM, but now CDP doesn’t feel it would be right to punish people just because they don’t mind DRM and choose to buy the Xbox One; which is honestly a commendable outlook. A game company putting gamers first? Amazing.

Now the question has become, “well then will the PC version have DRM to keep everything the same on all devices?” In an interview with Nathan Grayson from Rock, Paper, Shotgun Marcin Iwinski (Head of CDP) said they plan to launch with no DRM on the PC version. Iwinski also stated “It’s too early to talk specifics, but definitely all the DLCs and updates will be free, of course, we’ll see what the platform holders will allow – what we can do for free [on next-gen consoles]. I mean, there are different business models on consoles. From our standpoint, we’ll definitely do everything we can to deliver the same experience across all platforms.”

I have to say I do appreciate the outlook CDP has been taking on this whole situation and they do seem to be living up to the idea of putting gamers first.  Some people might argue the best interest of gamers would be served by Witcher 3 backing out of developing for Xbox One, but it wouldn’t do much except hurt the people who do end up getting Xbox One for their various reasons. It would in no way teach Microsoft any lesson.

I do have to say props to CDP for taking the high ground here. If you would like to read the full RPS interview you can read it here.

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